David Morris – brassedoff.net

Last weekend, we went to the IWA Canal Festival (I wrote about it at the time) and whilst browsing some of the trade stands, picked up a copy of the Vetus catalogue.

Vetus are well known in boating circles for their trademark yellow-painted engines, but they sell a huge range of boating-related ’stuff’ from portholes to sanitary systems and they’re all listed in their 100 or so page catalogue which makes for an interesting browse.

Because it’s one of those books you could pick up and spend two or three minutes just flicking through, it makes an ideal toilet book. After all, you don’t really want to be delving in to War and Peace. You want something to take your mind temporarily off the job in hand that doesn’t take a lot of “getting in to”.

Personally, I have a range of toilet reading matter. There are a couple (!) of issues of PC World, several Canal and Riverboat and the odd Waterways World all of which I browse depending on how the mood takes me.

Mrs Woolforbrains finds this strange. She doesn’t read on the lav. She says girls don’t generally read on the lav. I don’t even think she knits on the lav. Why is this? What is it about blokes that makes them want to read on the lav? I’ve often wondered why the Americans call it anything but a toilet (apparently, to call it a toilet is considered the height of rudeness). Bathroom. Restroom.

Bathroom it certainly isn’t. Most don’t have baths in them, but perhaps there’s a clue in the last one. Perhaps Americans read on the lav and they take the opportunity to go for a sit down and a browse of the latest copy of whatever it is they read whilst relieving themselves of the previous night’s curry and that’s where we’ve picked the habit up from? If that is the case, it’s one of the better traits our US compatriots have exported over here.

Excuse me. I’m off for a read…

On Saturday, Mrs Woolforbrains and I went to the IWA National Festival near Wolverhampton. It’s the first time either of us have ever visited one of the big canal-related national festivals, and I think I can state unequivocally that we were both impressed by the event and the organisation. Hundreds of boats, thousands of visitors, hundreds of exhibitors and although it had the potential to be a mud-bath of Glastonbury proportions, some judicious use of bark chippings and trackways courtesy of the WRG avoided a major mess.

  

  

Doing what I do for a day job brings me in to contact with many non-native English speakers (apart from the Americans!) who fortunately speak English much better than I do their language. We were very worried therefore when one of our German colleagues confided that he would be completely naked unless we could get his Blackberry password sorted out. Was this some sort of protest? “Get my Blackberry password sorted or I’m going to parade naked through the streets of my German home town and embarrass you with the pictures an media coverage”?

There were several tense moments in the office until one of the guys realised that what we had on our hands was in fact an example of phonetic spelling. Instead of saying ‘naked’ how you say it, think of the ‘a’ as in ‘at’ rather than as in ‘hay’ and you’ll see what he meant.

In these days of rising energy prices, someone’s tried to put some science behind the cost of making a cuppa. As someone who drinks a  lot of tea, this clearly is very important to me!

Read this posting for more details

That pretty much sums up how I felt this morning when I found out that the Seth Ellis web site had been hacked. Like most things, I suppose ultimately it was my own fault. I left the php scripts writable by the web server so I could update them via the Joomla portal interface, and then I wasn’t running the latest version of the software, the absolute latest version of which may of may not have fixed the vulnerability that I reckon I got exploted by.

Of course, it’s left me feeling upset and guilty, but as I suspect is usual with these things, I’m angry with myself for, as an IT professional, letting this thing happen, and mad at the dirty little scumbags that spend all their time going around looking for and infecting systems in the first place.

Before anyone asks the obvious, yes, I’ve got backups. I replicate the whole of the web server tree to another location every night. The hack happened, as dictade by the Law of Sod, just before the replication,  so, yes, I replicated the screwed up site.

What have I learned from this?

1. I need better backups- probably a two or three generation backup like we sue at work and I insist on for all our production environments

2. I need to make sure I don’t leave any vulnerable files writable by anything (including me)

3. I need to shift off my servers to a machine I don’t use for domestic purposes; either that or find a way of locking them down to a chrooted environment.

I’ve tracked down the bit of software that insisted on PHP safe_mode being turned off. I won’t be running gallery2 for a while which is a pity. Joomla doesn’t  need safe_mode off, neither does Wordpress and those are the two important applications for me at the moment. Gallery2 is nice, but it’s not nice enough for me to have to run a compromisable server.

We look upon our treatment of old computers (WEEE waste) as environmentally friendly in that we make a special effort to collect them all up in a single location and send them to an approved source for recycling… or so we hope. I really hope that our old gear doesn’t end up at this dump in Ghana. It’s frightening that changing the designation of this kit to reusable second hand goods seems to get around any export issues, especially when we try to ensure that the gear when we’ve done with it is unusable, especially the hard drives (after all, we wouldn’t want any data to be recovered). Perhaps a phone call to our recyclers will be in order on Monday morning to check up on the route old kit takes. We have a duty of care (in my opinion) to make sure we aren’t indirectly dumping it in a third world country for kids to pick their way over, polluting their drinking water and their seas.

We’ve had a bit of downtime on the home server over the last couple of days. The power supply gave up the ghost on Friday morning at 4am (I know this because the Phidget LCD panel froze when the machine died). I managed to get the server back up minus one of the disc drives, but it was on a knife edge. eBuyer and Citylink duly obliged with a shiny new 650 watt Antec TruePower Trio PSU this morning, and balance has once again been restored to the local blogosphere.

I love free software. I use free software at home and at work. I was delighted to be able to save hours of work today with two bits of free software.  Read on to find out how.

We had several new machines delivered today for a department at work. Rather nice machines, all with Windows XP (we have no plans to roll out Vista just yet). As they were all identical, it seemed a pity that we had to set each one up individually, but the last time we tried to ghost a machine, it failed dismally, so my tech-squad were reluctant to try again.

I convinced them that it should work, so best foot forward, I downloaded a copy of Clonezilla and  installed it on a USB memory stick. 30 minutes later, we’d managed to put an image of one of the new machines on to a Windows server. The acid test was whether or not it would restore and work, and sure enough, five minutes later, we still had a working machine. One of my guys then installed all the other stuff needed on the machine (Acrobat reader, Office, VNC, SMS etc) and we re-cloned it. It took roughly two hours to set up the base software on the machine, so if all went to plan, we’d save hours of time.

The first three machines restored without a hitch. The problem started with the fourth when it decided that the SATA hard disc wasn’t SDA, it was going to be SDB instead. (Clonezilla uses a Linux [Debian] base to save and restore partitions hence the naming convention). No idea why it came up with this, but it effectively stopped us restoring to those machines. Ever optimistic, I unplugged the SATA DVD on the machines that were giving us the problem and the restore worked fine. Once restored, we plugged the DVD drive back in, booted Windows and everything was fine. We had just set up seven machines in an afternoon – something which, if not multi-tasking, would have taken a couple of days. I don’t know if the naming was specific to the machines we were setting up (Dell Optiplex 755’s), but if anyone has any ideas, please leave a comment.

The second result for me today was bringing an idea Ihas last night whilst cycling home. Producing nicely formatted output, especially PDFs is an issue for us. We use Java for our in-house desktop applications, and make a lot of use of Bruno Lowagie’s excellent iText library. Creating forms from scratch is laborious and time consuming, not to mention it needs a lot of boring code. The idea that I had was to use Acrobat forms to create placeholders for the variable text, creating PDF templates for documents. Someone may read this and say “of course, that’s obvious, I’m surprised you weren’t already doing that”, and do you know, 55 lines of proof-of-concept code later, that’s exactly what I was saying to myself as well. I was so annoyed that I hadn’t spotted that little gem months ago. It would have saved so much buggering about. Needless to say, I don’t think we’ll be creating any PDFs from scratch any more. It’s going to make a huge difference for our document production at work and could easily save a fortune.